Warmth, Wings, and Home: The Life of Lorilee Colletti

Basic Information

Family and Home

Lorilee’s life read like a small, lovingly kept ledger of family moments: births, weddings, grandchildren, backgammon scores, and the steady rhythm of phone check-ins. She married Bruce Colletti around 1980, and their partnership stretched across 44 years—a long, steady arc in which husband and wife shared hobbies (backgammon, cooking), pets (Bengal cats), and a home anchored in Laguna Beach.

Three children grew up under that roof. The oldest, John, arrived around 1981; Lauren followed around 1985; and Stephen—perhaps the most publicly visible of the siblings—was born February 7, 1986. By the time Lorilee retired in 2013, she was already juggling a decades-long career and raising a family. Her role in the household was not theatrical; it was practical and radiant. She hosted gatherings, kept rituals alive (like horoscopes and weather checks for her children), and delighted in the small details that made family life bloom.

Career, Travel, and a Life in the Skies

Lorilee left UCLA in the mid-1970s and took to the skies. She began as a flight attendant with Air California, and that career carried her for approximately 35 years—a tenure that ended in April 2013. Thirty-five years in the same line of work is a measurement of constancy: it says she knew how to fold routines into grace and how to be both professional and warm while away from home.

Travel was both profession and passion. Her passport reads like a soft catalogue of places she loved: Quadra Island (Canada), islands in Hawaii, and corners of Europe such as Greece and Italy. She and her mother later traded the airplane cabin for a sailboat, taking cruises up the New England coast to watch fall colors—another chapter of traveling, quieter but no less vivid.

Timeline of Key Life Events

Private Rituals and Public Quiet

Lorilee’s public footprint was small—deliberately so. She was not a headline; she was the hearth. Her pleasures were tactile: orchids that opened like secrets, cookbooks thumbed to familiar pages, a bowl of clam chowder shared on a mild California afternoon. She was known for particular recipes—grandmother’s Scottish mints, spaghetti Bolognese, baked chicken with confetti rice—recipes that acted as family shorthand for comfort.

Her social media moments were sparse but telling. A retirement message in 2013 captured a son’s gratitude for a mother who “hung up her wings,” and a birthday post in 2016 recorded affection in a few simple lines. Beyond those posts, mentions were infrequent; her life remained, by choice and circumstance, private.

Illness, Care, and Final Months

In early 2021 Lorilee’s life shifted again: a cancer diagnosis marked a new season. Over the next three years she navigated radiation and chemotherapy, leaning on family routines and the close presence of Bruce and their children. Even as treatments curtailed appetites and some activities, small comforts persisted—the sound of a newspaper, the company of grandchildren, the ritual of checking horoscopes, the gentle victory of a backgammon match.

She died on May 23, 2024, in the town where she was born. The celebration of life on June 8, 2024 was an intimate counterpoint to the public ceremonies many lives receive; it was scaled to memories and the people who had shared in them. Four grandchildren, a husband of over four decades, three children, and a brother survived her; the ledger of her life continued in those names and in the details they remember.

Personality, Habits, and the Little Things

Lorilee’s character was made of small, repeatable gestures: sending a weather check, slicing an orange just so, preserving a high-school cheer uniform as a talisman. She loved the outdoors—childhood camping trips and fishing in Bishop for rainbow trout—and carried that early affinity into later years. She treasured longstanding friendships, hosted gatherings with deliberate care, and cultivated orchids as if each bloom were a personal achievement.

If her life were a room, it would be furnished with hospitality: linen tablecloths, a well-worn cookbook, a stack of newspapers, and a board game set ready for an evening match. Those who knew her remember steadiness more than spectacle.

Public Presence and Legacy

Lorilee’s name surfaces most often through family references—an appearance as a mother in a son’s televised youth, social media posts that mark life milestones, and an obituary that traces the outline of a private life. There are no sweeping public achievements attached to her name; instead, there is the cumulative weight of decades: 35 years of service in aviation, 44 years of marriage, the births of three children in the 1980s, and the growth of a family that includes four grandchildren.

Her story is not a headline so much as a page in a family album, the kind you turn through when you want to feel the steadiness of ordinary devotion. Like an old photograph left in sunlight, the edges may fade, but the faces inside remain distinct.